Monumentally failed Rudd calls for media watchdog to be abolished over Sky News COVID-19 claims

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd has called for the country’s media watchdog to be abolished, saying the regulator had “monumentally failed” in its responsibilities during the pandemic by not upholding broadcast standards at Sky News Australia.

In a continuation of his campaign against the Australian arm of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, Mr Rudd pointed to Sky News Australia airing claims denying the existence of the COVID-19 pandemic, questioning the safety of vaccines and promoting unproven treatments for the virus.

Kevin Rudd at a Senate hearing on media diversity in Australia earlier this year. He will use a second appearance to call for the media watchdog to be abolished after Sky News broadcast views denying the existence of the COVID-19 pandemic.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

“The Australian Media and Communications Authority (ACMA) has done nothing while Murdoch’s Sky News denied the pandemic, preached anti-vaccine nonsense, and accused medical experts of conspiring to conceal the truth from the public,” Mr Rudd said.

“ACMA has monumentally failed in its responsibility to the Australian people throughout this pandemic. Murdoch’s responsibility for vaccine distrust in this country cannot be ignored.”

Mr Rudd said he intended to recommend “ACMA be abolished and replaced” when he next gives evidence at a Senate inquiry into media diversity, which was established last year after a petition he circulated calling for a royal commission into Murdoch media amassed more than 500,000 signatures.

Mr Rudd did not expand on what should replace ACMA, but said it was unfair to ask the committee, which is controlled by Labor and Greens senators, to design the future of media regulation by its November reporting date.

“Media regulation is notoriously complicated. The Senate has neither the evidence base, nor the time to work through the detail,” Mr Rudd said.

In a statement, Sky News rejected Mr Rudd’s comments about the network.

“Any assertion that Sky News has denied the existence of COVID-19 or contributed to vaccine hesitancy are baseless, evidenced by the thousands of hours of coverage devoted to this issue. Anyone who watches the channel knows that Sky News strongly supports the vaccine rollout,” a spokeswoman said.

The Senate hearing, scheduled for last Friday but postponed due to the Canberra lockdown, was to scrutinise YouTube’s decision to ban Sky News for seven days for breaching its COVID-19 misinformation policies, with executives from both companies and ACMA called to give evidence.

But the witness list was expanded to include controversial Sky News hosts Alan Jones, Rowan Dean and Rita Panahi late last week after it emerged Sky had deleted more than 30 videos from its website, many of them criticising public health advice on hydroxychloroquine - an unproven treatment for COVID-19. The trio featured in some now-deleted videos.

Sky News, which claims to have more than 9 million viewers across its platforms each month, is required to abide by two ACMA-enforceable codes of practice: the subscription TV code and commercial TV code because it is broadcast in regional Australia on the free-to-air Southern Cross network.

The codes require broadcasters to ensure factual material is accurately presented and to clearly distinguish this content from commentary and analysis. But the codes contain no specific guidance about misinformation.

The ACMA operates under a co-regulatory model that gives broadcasters the initial responsibility for addressing complaints, while ACMA generally only takes action if complainants are not satisfied with the response.

An ACMA spokesman said it had received 31 complaints about Sky’s coverage of the pandemic since the beginning of 2020, with only one referred to the regulator for further investigation. The investigation prompted Sky News to issue a correction after it found Jones had “misrepresented research” relating to the effectiveness of masks and lockdowns on his show broadcast on regional TV station WIN in August 2020.

On his week-nightly show, Jones has repeatedly claimed the outbreak is “not a pandemic”, including in a now-deleted video from May that prompted the YouTube ban.

In another since-deleted clip from August 2020, co-hosts of the Outsiders program Dean, Panahi, and James Morrow, who has since been appointed The Daily Telegraph’s federal political editor, give viewers “the Outsiders guide to hydroxychloroquine” in which they talk up the effectiveness of the unproven treatment.

Panahi tells viewers that negative media coverage of the drug was driven by the fact then-US president Donald Trump had taken it and endorsed it.

“The leftist media’s disdain and hatred for Trump is such that they’re determined to convince you the president was wrong about HCQ all along, even if it means lives are lost that could have been saved through the drug,” Panahi said.

Morrow says in the video: “Indeed, the evidence about the effectiveness of HCQ is clear. Australian states that continue to ban Australian doctors from prescribing this drug to patients infected with coronavirus are playing with people’s lives.”

Dean, in a separate clip from September 2020, calls for Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly to resign over his stance that drug was not a proven treatment for COVID-19, saying “the jury is in and the jury says categorically hydroxychloroquine saves lives and Australians must be given access to this drug.”

In another video from July, former independent senator turned Sky News host Cory Bernardi refers to the vaccines as “experimental” and questions the need to indemnify doctors, saying “if everything is perfectly safe, why are all these exemptions from liability actually necessary?”.

Official advice from the federal Health Department states hydroxychloroquine “is not recommended outside of randomised trials with appropriate ethical approval”.

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Lisa Visentin is a federal political reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, covering education and communications.

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